What Is Digital Storytelling?

"Digital Storytelling" is an emerging term, one that arises from a grassroots movement that uses new digital tools to help ordinary people tell their own 'true stories' in a compelling and emotionally engaging form. These stories usually take the form of a relatively short story (less than 8 minutes) and can involve interactivity. The term can also be a broader journalistic reference to the variety of emergent new forms of digital narratives (web-based stories, interactive stories, hypertexts, and narrative computer games). (Wikipedia)
Background

Center for Digital Storytelling
Elements of Digital Storytelling
Apple Video Journalism
Digitales: The Art of Telling Digital Stories
David Jakes on Digital Storytelling
50 Ways to Tell a Story (Alan Levine--CogDogRoo fabulous list of tools and examples!) A must see!
PowerPoint Reform Tools

Why should teachers know and use digital storytelling tools and strategies?

To promote student creativity
To inspire narrative writing
To encourage learners to create and communicate in multiple media
To model digital-age work
To model respect for intellectual property using 21st century tools
To help students share their local stories with a larger community/audience
To promote, support, and model creative and innovative thinking and inventiveness (NETS*T)
To engage students in exploring real-world issues and solving authentic problems using digital tools and resources. (NETS*T)
To promote student reflection using collaborative tools to reveal and clarify students' conceptual understanding and thinking, planning, and creative processes. (NETS*T)

Images + Audio

There are several web 2.0 tools that can be utilized for digital storytelling. We will concentrate on two that allow you to upload digital images and/or video and add narration. The first one is Voicethread and the second one is Photostory

Free

The Free account at VoiceThread helps you get started and get to know VoiceThread. But what can you do with a Free VoiceThread account? With 3 minutes of phone commenting, 3 VoiceThreads at-a-time with up to 50 slides each, unlimited voice and text comments, and a webcam commenting storage limit that we haven't seen exceeded yet, you can do a lot with a Free VoiceThread account! In this section of the How To, you'll find answers to our most frequently asked questions relating to the Free account. Please take a look at this video to see the basic features of VoiceThread in action:Introduction to VoiceThread.

VoiceThread FAQ